Emotional States
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Caregiving: Setting Boundaries, Finding Balance and Connecting with Love
When we take care of someone else, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, depleted, and sometimes resentful. Learning to set loving boundaries, find balance and care for yourself as well, can allow you to connect with love and choice.
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Dressing for Yourself: Trusting Your Body and Your Taste
Clothing can become a referendum on whether we are acceptable. We may dress for a parent, partner, workplace, imagined critic, or younger version of ourselves and lose contact with the body wearing the clothes. Trusting your taste is not trivial. It is practice in sensing preference, tolerating visibility, and letting your presentation communicate something true.…
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The Income Limit You Set to Stay Safe
You can earn enough to pay the bills and still find yourself returning to the same income level. A fuller workday collapses through exhaustion. An unusual cancellation erases the extra. Opportunities arrive, but asking, scheduling, or following through becomes strangely difficult. Before blaming yourself, consider whether the current level is emotionally familiar. More income might…
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Fear of Intimacy: If I Get Close It Will Hurt
Even if we REALLY want love and closeness, if part of us is afraid of being hurt, it will be hard to attract the love we crave. Identifying the fears and then gently releasing them can allow more warmth and intimacy into our lives.
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When You Don’t Feel Worth the Work of Caring for Your Body
When care has meant criticism, obligation, or another impossible program, part of us may decide that caring for the body is not worth the work. What looks irrational about self care often becomes understandable when we ask what the body expects and what this response has been trying to prevent. With self care, the aim…
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The Forced-Performance Trap: Work, Calls, and Financial Safety
You know the call matters. Someone asked about your services. Returning it could lead to income. Yet days pass. The phone feels like a demand rather than an opportunity, and the longer you wait, the more shame gathers around it. This can be more than fear of the conversation. A protective part may be refusing…
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When Strength and Independence Feel Unsafe
Strength can sound desirable while feeling dangerous in the body. If independence once threatened family connection, invited punishment, or seemed impossible during illness, a part of us may equate being strong with being alone. The result can look like weakness or procrastination, yet the deeper conflict is relational: I want capacity, and I also want…